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Artist biography

Eadweard J. Muybridge

Eadweard J. Muybridge (Edward James Muggeridge) American, b. England, 1830-1904
Around 1852 Edward James Muggeridge, born in Kingston-on-Thames in Surrey, immigrated to California and by 1856 had established himself in the book business in San Francisco. He learned the art of photography in 1867, possibly from his friend Silas Selleck. Soon after, he emerged as the "artist-photographer" Eadweard Muybridge. Also known as "Helios," the proprietor of a mobile photo wagon called the Flying Studio, he became associated with Selleck's cosmopolitan gallery.
Muybridge was one of the best early western landscape photographers. His work included a coastal survey for the U.S. government, as well as topographical, landscape, and portrait photographs made from Alaska to Central America. His large wet plate views of Yosemite rank with those of Carleton Watkins as among the finest ever taken, and his multiprint panoramas of San Francisco are highly prized.
In 1872 Muybridge began the experimental study that occupied him for the remainder of his life and for which he is best known. It stemmed from a commission by former California governor Leland Stanford, Jr., who asked him to capture photographically the movement of a galloping horse. Muybridge quickly became a renowned lecturer and authority on the photography of motion, developing one of the first camera shutters in 1869 and the zoogyroscope (an early machine for projecting pictures that appeared to move) in 1880. His work contributed to the development of the motion picture.
Muybridge continued his investigations for three years at the University of Pennsylvania (1883-86) and in 1887 published the result of some 15 years of accumulated research in the 11 volumes of his immense study, Animal Locomotion, which consisted of 19,347 negatives. Muybridge's own stride was broken temporarily by his trial in 1874 for the murder of his wife's lover, a charge that he acknowledged but of which he was acquitted. T.W.F.

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